Topless in Tuscany Not Tolerated - The Florentine

20
Thursday 7 July 2005
The ARTS
Life in Italy
www.theflorentine.net
When Tourists Feel Strange:
15 years after The Stendhal Syndrome
By Joseph E. Calderone
When Inge was struck by
Brunelleschi’s sculpted
wooden “Crucifix” and
Nardo di Cione’s “Last Judgement”
in the Strozzi Chapel, and by the
magnificently frescoed Spanish
Chapel where everything is in the
feminine, she saw those raised fingers
in the fresco accusing her. “It’s
my fault my mother died…But, am
I dreaming?” She returned to her
pensione with a stinging sense of
alarm, a sense that she was an outsider
in this place. “What am I doing
here?” she wondered. Inge felt
as though she had disturbed the delicate
order of things. Everyone was
beginning to talk about her in many
different languages. “I had caused
a big scandal,” she said, “it seemed
they were writing about me in newspapers,
they were talking about me
on the radio, and they were following
me on the streets.”
Perhaps you recall the scene from
E.M Forster’s travel novel, A Room
with a View, when Lucy is caught
in Piazza Santa Croce on a hot and
humid afternoon without her Baedeker’s
guidebook. Although she
admires the majesty and aesthetic
beauty of the church Lucy feels lost
without her guidebook and lacks
the confidence to view the art in its
context. Later in the novel, she is
in Piazza della Signoria and notices
two Italian men arguing. Then she
witnesses the savagery of one of the
men being stabbed, blood trickling
from between his lips. In one moment
she is witness to conflicting
imagery of beauty and horror, eros
and thanatos. This condition of sundromos,
or ‘running together’ of disparate
emotions evokes in Lucy an
inexplicable hysteria and psychosomatic
reaction. She faints unexpectedly
only to be revived by George,
an unrefined man of whom she dismisses
then later falls in love. Much
has changed since the days of innocent
Victorian women swooning in
piazzas under heavy layers of petticoat,
but today, at the very least, we
have some hard science to explain
these phenomena.
Although these true and fictional
stories seem to have been pulled
directly from a ‘News of the Weird’
column, they share an element in
common: they are all symptoms of
a psychiatric condition typical to
Florence called Stendhal Syndrome.
Any tourist who becomes struck by
this illness is in the great majority
of cases referred to the hospital of
Santa Maria Nuova’s first aid station.
Stendhal Syndrome is a psychosomatic
illness that causes rapid
heartbeat, dizziness, confusion, and
even hallucinations when the individual
is exposed to an overdose of
beautiful art, paintings, and artistic
masterpieces. It shares common
characteristics with other syndromes
like the Stockholm and Jerusalem
syndromes.
Like other syndromes it is a complexity
of symptoms leading to an
abnormal state of mind and body. If
you happen to be struck by this illness,
you will probably get a housecall
or an emergency visit from my
aunt, Graziella Magherini, the psychiatrist
and brains behind the theory.
Over a ten-year period, from
1977 to 1986, she observed a correlation
between certain psychiatric
disorders and travelling combined
with the viewing of artwork that
manifested in abnormal behaviour.
It has been 15 years since her discoveries
were published in a book
entitled La Sindrome di Stendahl
(1990). The study won Dr. Magherini
global critical acclaim. Cult
filmmaker Dario Argento directed
a horror movie by the same name.
As recent as 2003, Tony Award-winning
playwright, Terrence McNally,
directed a two-act play starring Isabella
Rosellini, and The New York
Times Magazine’s “Fall Fashion
Issue” dedicated an article to her
theory. The Stendhal Syndrome
has gotten a lot of mileage. But why
is there still such a fuss over these
findings? We asked Dr. Graziella
Magherini the reasons behind the
timelessness of her theory.
Is there a timeless quality about your
findings that continues to catch people’s
interest?
The Stendhal Syndrome is current
and constantly renews itself.
As long as there are people visiting
museums and reflecting on artwork
the theory will always be acknowledged:
even in its more ‘physiological’
forms. That is, if a tourist encounters
a work of art with a receptive
soul, desiring to ‘understand,’
the work will prove to be a moment
of uncertainty and of suffering that
becomes an “obligatory” passage
until the tested emotion transforms
itself into an aesthetic and conscious
pleasure. The clinical cases
that I have discovered and studied
are only the tip of the iceberg of a
phenomenon much more diffuse
that forms the basis of the “aesthetic”
experience.
How did you feel about Dario Argento’s
treatment of the subject matter?
Did you think it was exploitative?
Regarding Dario Argento’s film, I
contributed to the first part, the part
of the film that dealt with the spontaneous
emergence of the psychic
episode of suffering in the young
female police officer in front of the
paintings. The theory was realized
very well. The second half of the
film, on the other hand, is uniquely
Dario Argento’s. Film is, after all, a
collaborative process.
A few years ago someone attacked
the David with a hammer? Was this
part of the syndrome?
Yes. Even the need to disfigure
art is a part of this syndrome.
Why are people fascinated by mental
illness?
People are fascinated by mental
illness because unbeknownst to
them mental illness touches then,
unconsciously, the insane part of
every sane person.
Does the Syndrome have something
to do with the magic of Florence?
Florence is certainly a city capable
of unchaining the syndrome. In
a small territory there is such a large
concentration of history, culture,
and artistic beauty. It’s an overdose.
Under these circumstances the past
re-emerges and imposes itself on the
mind. Visits to a city like Florence,
full of history and art, touch everyone’s
personal lives.
Is it time to re-release the book? In
English this time?
Yes. Although it has been translated
in many languages, I would be
very happy to see it in English.
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